That had the vaguely deflating feeling of learning how to do some magic tricks you saw long ago while also realizing that you’ve developed your own ideas about magic in the interim—but also that some tricks are harder to do than they appear.
The easy part for me was doing Sedlar’s New Mexico sushi one better. As it appears in this book, from a long time ago, you can tell that sushi was for nouvelle diners still a pretty novel experience, and the idea of substituting fresh ingredients from other places even newer still. The California roll in some form or another was invented in Little Toyko in the 1960s or early 1970s, and started to pop up elsewhere by the 1980s. Futomaki with non-Japanese ingredients were still a new idea in the 1980s and now they’re kind of established (or old hat). But if I was going to make a “New Mexico futomaki” I was pretty determined to do more than this cookbook advised—I am 100% sure that by the time Sedlar was cooking in his post-Saint-Estephe restaurants he was or would have done the same. So what I did was replace his green bell pepper with thin strips of poblano chile (I honestly hate the taste of green bell pepper, which I know I find time to say in this column regularly), and replaced the generic onions with thin julienne strips of scallion. I made the rice properly with vinegar and sugar (though I used a mix of sherry and apple vinegar rather than rice vinegar), and on top of the composed roll just before rolling, I put chile de arbol pepper, smoked Maldon salt, and a squeeze of lime juice. Plus the corn from the cookbook.
It feels cheeky—or even a bit of a sacrilege—but I am sure this is better than the recipe as strictly offered in the book. I’d even go so far as to say it was pretty damn good, at the level of “I would make this for my best friends in a second”.
The fancy pasta in a sculptural form? You can see where this was going maybe here at the cutting stage. I was actually pleased that I got no-fooling green pasta and no-fooling red chile pasta as per the recipe. The green is harder to make than I would have guessed but Sedlar’s instructions work like a charm (though it feels a bit of a waste of parsley and spinach). Cutting rolled-out sheets of correctly colored pasta, though to make the exact architectural shapes that Sedlar and his staff rolled out night after night? Well, I think I’d need a few years in the Culinary Institute of America to get even close. This felt like being in the introductory studio arts class trying to do the style of a famous artist only without even the security blanket of cutting up a famous work into teeny quadrants.
Plating it with the jalapeno vinegar cream sauce was even harder. The pasta tasted pretty good, but keeping it above the sauce? Not happening. It kind of sank into it and also got cold almost instantly, all at once. The flavors were great, but I’d do service in a more homely and less artistic way to get it all going. Maybe as green and red chile linguini bathed in the sauce. I have no idea what this tasted like back in the day and if it tasted great and was hot throughout and the pasta sat up properly on top of the sauce, well, that is a godly achievement.
Also, I remember being so overwhelmed with Sedlar’s use of “paints” for plate decoration and I’d never really looked at what they are. What they are is water, garlic, chile powder and a bit of oil in a squeeze bottle—well, there’s some that are more complicated, but that’s basically it. I didn’t bother with them this time—I had enough to deal with—but I’ll try it myself in the near-term future.
I thought the tomato sauce for the lamb tenderloins looked boring and I was right. (In the book, it’s a full saddle of lamb, but I don’t have a friendly family butcher that would do that for me or the financial inclination to shell out for it.) I put some dried cascabel chiles in the sauce before sieving it fine and I wish I’d done more to give it some layers and complexity. The “tortilla lasagna” was simple and delicious and a good accompaniment, but I might have used a bit of cilantro or epazote in it rather than basil—the French elements of the book’s recipes sometimes are a limitation rather than an affordance.
Anyway, no bloom off the rose of my memories exactly, but I’m both less intimidated and less impressed by some of the recipes in the book all at once.